Time-bending leap to Fringe's final season

By Mike Hale THE NEW YORK TIMES

Friday

Sep 28, 2012 at 12:01 AM

In just four seasons of the Fox series “Fringe,” the dogged FBI agent Olivia Dunham has been used as a child guinea pig by a pair of mad scientists; kidnapped in an alternate universe and experimented on some more; surreptitiously replaced by her alternate-universe doppelganger, who has a baby by Olivia’s boyfriend; possessed by Leonard Nimoy; shot and killed in 2026; and shot and killed again in 2012. (Yes, after she was shot in 2026.)

The abuse will continue when “Fringe” begins its final season tonight. Having been beaten, tortured, killed and put into comas while repeatedly saving the world, Olivia (Anna Torv) suffers her greatest indignity yet: She’s turned into a piece of furniture. Literally.

You could argue that similarly rough treatment has been handed out to the show’s fans, who have been whiplashed among universes and timelines as the producers have completely recalibrated their wild science-fiction-mystery narrative from season to season. The drastic changes and increasingly far-out notions may be part of the reason the show has been given just 13 more episodes to wrap things up, its average audience having dropped to just more than 4 million from 10 million in four years. (A deadly Friday-night slot beginning in Season 3 also has something to do with it.)

But if the ride has been dizzying, it’s also been tremendous fun, if you like this kind of roller-coaster. “Fringe” has a core of obsessive viewers, the kind who write fan fiction and maintain detailed, up-to-date websites. Combining an overarching adventure with weekly crime cases and a tortured central love story, it’s a descendant of a couple of other shows that developed similar die-hard followings, “The X-Files” and “Lost.” (The writer and producer J.J. Abrams was in on the creation of both “Lost” and “Fringe.”)

In their early years, both of those shows were better than “Fringe.” But neither was as audacious, and both could have learned a few lessons from the “Fringe” showrunners, Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman, in how to keep a long-running science-fiction serial from imploding. (Pinkner left before the current season.)

Unlike “Lost,” which expanded horizontally as its story lines multiplied, adding characters like mayflies, “Fringe” has expanded vertically. It has maintained an equally challenging narrative — colliding universes, genetically modified shape-shifting assassins, bald time travelers who have now, as Season 5 begins, enslaved the human race — while concentrating on a core of three characters, Olivia; her civilian colleague and eventual lover, Peter (Joshua Jackson); and Peter’s stand-in father, the LSD-loving genius Walter (John Noble).

The cast seems larger, however, because Olivia and Walter, along with a handful of other regulars, have been doubled and tripled over the years with the addition of the alternate universe and then different timelines. Multiple versions of each main character except Peter have existed, providing an acting challenge that Torv in particular has risen to and giving the show a way to maintain novelty without adding confusion.

And while the show has had its share of lapses in logic and obvious backfilling of story lines, it’s never come close to going down the narrative rabbit hole the way “Lost” did in its final seasons. No matter how drastic the swings between seasons, an overall consistency has been maintained, helped by the tight focus on a relatively small number of relationships.

Most important, it’s continued to combine ambitious storytelling with pulpy, Saturday-matinee energy, something neither “Lost” nor “The X-Files” could manage in their later seasons as they slid into pretension and hokey, unconvincing mysticism.

Fox’s abrupt decision in April to do a shortened final season has necessitated storytelling leaps that are drastic even by “Fringe” standards. The primary action has jumped ahead to 2036, with the inhuman Observers ruling Earth like telepathic slave masters. As forecast in the hastily assembled, stand-alone Season 4 episode “Letters of Transit,” the members of the Fringe team have emerged from suspended animation and joined Peter and Olivia’s daughter, Etta (who’s now only a few years younger than they are), for the final 13-episode fight to save the human race.

It seems likely that the show will move away completely from its weekly procedural roots, and that the story may start to feel rushed. It’s also likely that the threads we care about will be tied up and most of our questions satisfactorily answered.

And on the evidence of Friday’s season opener, “Fringe” will continue to be the best show of its kind since “The X-Files” at the intimate or humorous instances like Olivia’s Crate & Barrel moment (which won’t be further spoiled here). When you get the small things right, it’s less crucial that your universes and time shifts exactly line up.

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